Publishers recently pulled a book, Bad and Boujee, on 'trap feminism' after the author was accused of racial and cultural appropriation and unethical citational practices. The backlash to the book centered on whether the author, a White theologian named Jennifer Buck, was qualified to write a book within the framework of Black feminist theology.
This controversy is the latest iteration of an important but seldom clearly articulated question: What role should White scholars play in research that focuses on Black subjects?
Dr. Janelle Peifer
There are troubling precedents: Many White scholars have written about Black subjects in ways that ultimately mirrored and compounded the very injustices and violence narrated in their works. The first professional historians of slavery proffered an array of deeply racist arguments that haunted historiography for generations. Ulrich B. Philips characterized slavery as a vital element of racial “control.” Similarly, in psychology, Carl Campbell Brigham pioneered the study of intelligence and developed the SAT to advance eugenicist objectives.
That was the past, but are modern White scholars truly better equipped to write about Black people in a way that eschews White supremacy? Even if we grant that today’s researchers are less likely to have explicitly racist motivations, there is still the matter of scholarly perspective: of accounting for one’s “lens.”
We argue that scholars need to do a better job of addressing their own positionalities and perspectives as part of their work, and that scholars’ failure to address their own perspectives and biases in their work stems from a common but misguided identification of “objectivity'' as an obtainable lens. Many scholars believe that — if they do their work correctly — their own identity is not relevant to that work. But the notion that one can be a neutral presence — asking questions, distributing surveys, or choosing which archival material to examine — seems impossible from our vantage point.
The questions we ask and the interpretations we make are deeply informed by who we are and what we think matters in the world. Yet, White academics are often able to put forward scholarship that is interpreted as culture-free and universal, even when their samples are overwhelmingly WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Simultaneously, work by Black scholars about Black subjects is often interpreted as navel-gazing and self-obsessed: “me studies” or “mesearch.”
